The tabletop RPG hobby is the worst
 

Like

literally

the worst

I know this is a bold theory, but after reading literally (literally) three different discussions concerning rape and how appropriate a subject it is to stick in your D&D game (in much worse terms, I'm simplifying) today, I am fully prepared to join whatever other hobby will have me. A hobby that involves literally eating shit would not be as shitty as the one I am stuck in.

Because it's not like it's just a few deeply awful people. I could deal with that.

It's that most of the responses take them seriously. They answer rape-related rules questions without a twinge of guilt in their black heart, citing that, yes, according page XX of the Book of Whatever the Fuck, her vagina does count as an unarmed strike. They discuss these ideas like they are logical and sane, instead of creepy and twisted and wrong.

And there is nary a single person asking them what the FUCK is wrong with them.

So, then, of course, when I came into the thread to tell some dude that he is in fact a bag of dicks, because he is being a bag of dicks on account of being what is, in my subjective experience at that moment, the worst person in the world, people pile into the thread to defend him, using arguments that could not be more poorly constructed if a master of debate spent his entire lifetime crafting them.

So, in conclusion, FUCK EVERYTHING.

---------- Post added at 11:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:57 PM ----------

What frustrates me is not that this is just a particularly shitty day or anything, it's that this is a recurring problem. Not just specifically rape and more generalized sexism, although those seem to be a recurring feature.

It's that the hobby consistently has a seemingly never-ending well of astonishing awfulness to draw from. I see shit like this, thinking about, almost every single week. You combine it with the general-issue awfulness and tribalism that invades the entire thing and I am coming to have a really hard time believing that a substantial number of the people involved in my hobby are not deeply awful people.

I have a general rule, no subject is taboo. I also have a rule that the game is about "fun" so I make it clear what is and is not ok with people. In games with dark tones this is often part of the premise. Like I am running a game of Eclipse Phase and I warned the players several times you will encounter horrible things.

So while I have no issue with it being in a game on principle just as I do not dismiss murder, torture, slavery, etc.

Personally I dislike playing in games that are too dark. I do not like being scared or unsettled, my mind is twisted enough without my entertainment being full of this crap. Though I do get the impression your issue is more about how these things are handled. Seeing how most mediums treat concepts like rape that does not surprise me at all and can definitely see why that would be rage inducing

well shit, there goes my aspirations for being a wealthy land baron in settlers of catan.

I stick with places like Giant in the Playground for that kind of stuff since they actually enforce standards with stuff like that. If you're having the terrible people problem, then you're probably at the wrong site and should leave them to fester and rot in their own quarantine pit.

Cripes.

The only time the subject of rape was anywhere close to being a thing in our D&D group was when we decided to play an "evil" campaign on D&D 4e. This is going to take a while, but bear with me.

Ok, so, the whole point of that campaign is that the DM is terrible about railroading and we wanted to screw with him because all of his PCs are ridiculous combos. So our evil campaign has a vampire lord send us off to some town to get "it" which he won't describe, at all. He doesn't say if it's an object, a person, a monster or even information, no, he just says to get "it". After some ridiculous adventures where we end up starting up a revolution against the royalty by convincing a bunch of homeless people - most of them non-humans and we were all non-humans - that it was the only way things would get fixed, we eventually find an item that summons some ridiculously powerful creature, but while it's summoned we're basically powerless - this was the DM's solution to "how will an evil group stay together" because we're all clearly cartoon villains.
So we decide that clearly the best thing to do is summon the darn thing so it fights the vampire lord and they destroy eachother. Upon coming back to the castle, the vampire lord is now using everything he can to disguise himself as some rich noble and throwing a party and has an adventuring party ready to kill us. Our even more ridiculous plan is show up at the party, stop a play that's going on and make it about a vampire ( played by our orc wearing a cape and with carrots on his tusks ) that sends a party ( of a drow and a half-orc ) across the world to find "something" and that the thing he wants is basically a nuke.
The vampire lord responds by going "oh so he's that evil? you mean he'd do this?" and proceeds to rip off the clothes off some random girl and rape her, then kills her and throws her on the ground...And sends an adventuring party that has a GOOD PALADIN in it to kill us and they abide.

I have no fucking idea where are you going Bookie, but that's definitely not the best of places.

Yeah, that is one subject that never comes up in the games the group I'm in. But let's be honest: Given the approximate timescale... it is something that can and probably does happen in the more lawless areas.

I suspect it's primarily the place.
 

I would also suggest it's the place.

Paizo forums is usually pretty solid about this as well (like the Giant in the Playground, Aldurin mentioned earlier).

Rape does come up as a topic, but its either fully realized as the unbelievably awful thing it is, people shout down the person who doesn't, the moderators take care of it, and/or some combination of the above (almost always including the moderators in that case).

But that doesn't mean it's something that needs rules. NPCs can do whatever they want, but no player character should be raping people. It's like how there are no rules for shitting on someone's chest or eating vomit; it just shouldn't come up assuming the people around the table have any respect for each other.

This isn't aimed specifically at you, Flare. Your comment was just a good segue into what I've wanted to say from the beginning.

And what is wrong with your DM, Ryong, and why didn't anyone ventilate that vampire's chest while he was raping his guests? Or smack the DM while he embarrassed himself?

We were all stuck in a "are you shitting me" look because he said the whole "ripped off her clothes raped her and then snapped her neck" thing in a single sentence.

Another completely different villain in another campaign he DM'd randomly started doing one-handed handstand push ups for the sake of showing off.

He doesn't think these through very well and then just drops the whole action as a single sentence that somehow can't be stopped.

personally I wouldn't automatically put that in the negative. I'd be more worried if he spent several minutes detailing what the NPC was doing

The thread that prompted this particular rant was on GiantITP, sooooooooo. It got locked when a mod noticed it, but it's still pretty depressing. It's not like I'm hanging out on /tg/ or whatever.

Anyway, I don't think rape as a subject should be axiomatically excluded from RPGs as a topic (either in books or in play), but it's something that needs to be handled with infinite amounts of tact and care, and I honestly can't think of a single example of it being handled well off the top of my head.

Yeah, and I never did say that it did need rules, and in fact, PCs shouldn't touch it was a 20-foot pole. However it can be used as a plot/quest device if properly addressed.

Paizo. Paizo. Paizo. I can say other words! Watch: Paizo. Dang it.
 

Well, I don't hang out on GitP, so I can't speak for that quality, though I presumed it based off of other comments, but for me, Paizo is really sensitive about that kind of thing.

Thus, the Paizo forums come highly recommended.

Also worth noting, I'm pretty sure Table Top gaming isn't actually the worst; it's down there on the ladder, to be sure (or at least it can be), but it's worth noting that, regardless of the topic, I'm reasonably sure no one is going to go out and perform anything like what they're talking about.

After all, how many times do we (as individuals and players) break into "other races' homes", kill them all, and take their stuff?

It is different in that those can be looked at as "monsters" whereas rape is a very real thing that happens to "people", but:
a) again I'll point to the Paizo forums where there's a thriving community of people who are all about treating the "monsters" as people (and very fascinating things come from that)
b) there's plenty of human (and human-like) foes in the game, too, and it certainly doesn't encourage real violence despite depicting them as villains to slay (and despite people attempting to claim it does since the 80's); also violence is totally a real thing in our world, too

So you can be encouraged by that, at least.

(NOTE: I'm not saying you're wrong to be disgusted. I am, too. I'm saying don't worry too much about it. This is the internet. That kind of thing happens, unfortunately.)

---------- Post added at 01:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:32 PM ----------

(Taking advantage of the auto-merger feature! Woo! Goin' crazy here!)

Also, I don't know if I mentioned it before, but Ryong, that story is incredibly messed up.

As a GM, I've made the mistake of "Villain does X/Y/Z" in a sentence, but never to... ugh.

Was he at least a new GM (or kind of new)? That might explain some things.

We decided to play the evil campaign to screw with him because the campaign he did before was railroaded to an extreme ( he followed the plot to the tower of druaga anime completely ) and I don't know if he had actually DM'd before that druaga campaign ( I joined midway through ). I wouldn't be surprised if that was his second campaign ever ( even if I am doing a MUCH better job on my first campaign, per everyone in the group ).

Hey

Hey Bookie

Grognards.txt

It's a depository of the worst tabletop arguments culled from the internet. The worst ones.

It will make you wanna burn the world to ashes.

Not too sure why rape has game mechanics to it. I mean using rape as a theme or event in a story is okay if handled with the seriousness the subject deserves, but having it actively in the game, well, for one, it's rules bloat. And if one insists, grappling rules, but seriously, why the heck would there be a played-out rape in a freaking tabletop game. The games are about fun, and if this is your idea of fun, again depending on the context, psychological help might be considered.

I recently started a hiatus on tabletop gaming for slightly less serious reasons, but ones that nonetheless were ruining the fun for me. In our age of technology almost all of my players bring laptops to sessions, which is okay! I use a laptop as the DM because I pretty much have to. I keep a lot of notes and it saves a lot of paper. Also I can ninja-google rules faster than anyone can flip through a rules book. But players increasingly also want to sit on Facebook chat, Steam chat, or YouTube and just cause disruptions whenever they feel like they shouldn't pay attention to a scene or they learn someone hasn't seen Miley Cyrus Twerking yet and you just GOTTA SEE IT RIGHT NOW.

Also, metagaming reached a critical point that, it was actually the final nail in the coffin where I said "That's it, I'm done here." One character learned a significant secret being stored in the temple in the city the PCs were adventuring in. The city was under siege, but the PCs didn't know exactly why. This one PC learned why, due to being the daughter of the protector of said important artifact. The PC chose NOT to divulge the secret item or location to anyone else. As the enemies gained access to the city proper and were nearing the temple, one of the other PCs cuts everyone off and says:

"Hold on hold on. I really need to know why they're attacking the temple. Is there some artifact they're hiding here or something?" *Stares directly at the PC who knows the details*

"Err...um..." *PC with details looks uncertain - I forgive this guy because this was his first time playing tabletop ever*

"Tell me what they're doing at the temple right now, tell me what you know." *staring intensely at the PC with the information*

And the PC with the details broke down and told him.

Note: The PC demanding the information doesn't even know that the other PC knows something. This might come off as legitimate intimidation, but no, this was probably the biggest instance of metagaming I've ever witnessed in person, besides the age-old "So what's the bosses AC?"

It's too bad I put myself on a hiatus because I already miss roleplaying. And I just got the Mutants and Masterminds Deluxe Edition handbook from Kickstarter and I really want to run a superhero campaign. AH well.

This thread actually surprised me that apparently there's rules for rape outside of FATAL and that one weird D&D book about sex.

D&D 4e has a magic monocle with a power that you identify one value of an enemy's defenses. I don't know why it exists.

No, really, I don't know what you mean. There are?
 

... what?

Oh yes tactics, in fact one of my favorite games features the concept in it prominently, Poison'd the game where you play morally accurate pirates. In this particular instance it is considered a form of enduring duress, which is ultimately on par with various kinds of torture, extreme harm, poisoning ect. D Vincent Baker actually caught some chaff on the matter due to the way various players have handled the situation when ultimately he put the whole idea in because in a game where the mystique of piracy is being washed out for the more desperate reality of it rape was going to be a thing that was there, and it is as dark and as terrible as you are willing to make it. Still adore the game though, but definitely requires a specific kind of people to play it with.

This ends up being a matter for me of lines and veils. Before a game like Poison'd, or pretty much any DnD evil campaign which is brimming with badness to its very core you need to discuss with the people you are playing with the lines that we as players cannot cross, and the lines we are willing to cross but only if it is veiled and not pushed into detail with.

For the most part rape for me is a veiled concept, I can imagine it as a plot device and with very specific people I can even imagine it in the hands of PC's, but there is never really a good reason for us to play out such a dark act.

In my last game of Poison'd I remember the rape being a present thing, it was used by one particular character as a method of dominance to others rather than conventional violence. His favored means was to force the individual into a situation where they would agree to the treatment in exchange for his help. He was a disgusting bastard of a man who believed in nothing more than himself and wished to spit in the eye of god, the devil, and had an endless spite for every living thing on earth.

He was honestly very well done, every time he did the action it made you feel small, and weak, and questioning if you had made the right choice of enduring this instead of the alternative. You felt used and angry and changed. It was a strong thing to experience, but not everyone can play something like this.

I'm taking this from the original post where:

So yeah.